Caron Creighton's camera captures the vibrant and organized unhoused community of the Wood Street Commons in West Oakland, and the trials they must endure to fight for the right to survive in the face of a looming eviction.
Former tenants of 1770 Broadway fought and won relocation payments after a fire destroyed their homes and displaced them.
Bay Area Current’s guide to your local native species and why they matter.
It’s funny to think that many view the left as out of touch with reality. To be on the left is to reckon with our material conditions, to have a sense of which ways the winds are blowing, to understand the contradictions of contemporary life. This makes us at Current particularly (even empirically?) well-suited to make our predictions for the year ahead.
Some clear trends emerged from our well-informed hypotheses. We believe the tech backlash will only grow stronger, and that there’ll be a move towards all-things-analog. Think community bulletin boards, in-person shopping, and the like (Places taking cash even gets two mentions). The trappings of adulthood seem to be "in" — we believe suits will make a comeback, as well dinner parties and wisdom more generally. Perhaps it's the Mamdani effect (i.e. the success of a fellow millennial) or just the fact that we’re almost all in our thirties now. We also seem to be getting tougher. Arms are getting toned, gun ownership is in, and comfort is out. A few of us foresee shifts towards localism and away from optimization (protein power, supplements, and the like are all decidedly out).
Check out the below for our forthcoming material realities and do your own trend analysis ☺︎
IN: Suits, toned arms, short hair with bangs, experimental music in the mainstream
OUT: Football, photo dumps on Instagram, shag haircuts, Democrats, any food-related fashion (sardine necklaces, etc.)
IN: Multi-lingual albums, neighborhoods, shopping in person, handicrafts, active search
OUT: Doordash, corruption-as-chic, protein
PREDICTION: The internet is breaking and people are going to look more actively for media and entertainment they trust.
IN: Love, anything handmade, turducken, being woke, PLEZi
OUT: Hate, AI, turkey, anti-woke, Gatorade
PREDICTION: Donald Trump leaves this realm.
IN: Disciplined belonging, frozen produce, non-committal political extremism, ultra-processed foods as a flex
OUT: Doing bits, cartoonish branding, supplements
PREDICTION: The Bay Area will experience a rise in regional culture wars, especially around tech. It will also bleed into other areas like aesthetics, consumer choices, and the like.
IN: Places taking cash, humans, rebellions
OUT: Spotify, canned cocktails, Stanley cups, tooth gems, Labubus
PREDICTION: Jacob Elordi will unfortunately continue to succeed. He's just too tall!
IN: Braids, craftsmanship, being an adult, pubs or really anything British, hanging out in cars
OUT: Bowls, being chaotic, clowns and puppeteering, shells, CHUNKY shoes
PREDICTION: Bay Area residents will finally dress well.
IN: Folk music, gun ownership, suede leather, torrenting, community bulletin boards
OUT: AI (duh), streaming services, posting, the shoegaze-industrial-complex, 2000s point-and-shoot cameras
PREDICTION:
Wants: stolen (hacked?) Waymo in a sideshow, AI bubble burst, reinvigorated DIY scene in the Bay.
Prediction: Multiple of my friends get flip phones.
IN: Actually dancing at the club, tennis, physical photo albums, home-cooked dinners with friends, small-scale hyper-regional niche art communities and productions
OUT: Dubai, celebrity beefs (nobody gaf), robots, spending a fortune on concert tickets, septuagenarians and older in politics
PREDICTION: We’ll see a lot more media about class war and late-stage capitalism that actually says something. But cynical studios hoping to capitalize on the trend will try to compete with their own hollow fluff, which will be funny.
IN: Guest books, taking the bus home from the bar, personal archives, hand-me-downs, headpieces
OUT: Partiful, pop-ups, man-on-the-street videos with celebs, trans-humanism, peace politics
PREDICTION: The Baggu / BART merch is not the last of its kind that we’ll see. The commodification (and specifically pop-up-ification) of public goods continues.
IN: Ineffective altruism, infiltration, cash, vandalism, disposable cameras
OUT: Music snobbery, the AI boom, 9-9-6, agency as a concept, city council
PREDICTION: Tech will descend deeper into barbarism; the silver lining will be the resurgence of the tech worker movement. Better pick a side fast.
IN: Public transit, talking to people in real life, optimism of the will
OUT: Waymos, DoorDash, dating apps, AI slop
PREDICTION: The tech billboards will be even more obnoxious.
IN: Bertolt Brecht, wisdom
OUT: Comfort, vacations
PREDICTION: Politics "on the ground" will keep getting better, but politics "in government" hasn't hit rock bottom yet.
Caron Creighton's camera captures the vibrant and organized unhoused community of the Wood Street Commons in West Oakland, and the trials they must endure to fight for the right to survive in the face of a looming eviction.
Bay Area Current’s guide to your local native species and why they matter.
Wallace Shawn’s ironic polemic against class society takes audiences on a psychic and physical journey after dark.
